Paedophile ring trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell ‘was IRA target’

The daughter of deceased press baron Robert Maxwell is due to learn her fate next week on charges of grooming and delivering underage girls to her paedophile partner Jeffrey Epstein.

Her legal team has now claimed she received death threats following Epstein’s arrest in July 2019, which was why she was hiding when federal agents came to arrest her in July 2020.

In submissions to New York Judge Alison Nathan, they state this was not the first time she had experienced a threat to her life as she was on an IRA list of targets when her father was an MP in the late 1960s.

“Decades earlier, when Ms Maxwell was just a child and her father was a Member of Parliament, UK authorities found a hit list of potential targets in a safehouse used by the Irish Republican Army,” they stated.

They added: “Ms Maxwell’s name was first on the list.”

Maxwell (60) has asked for her sentence to be set at between 51 and 63 months rather than the 20 years recommended by the US probation service.

She was found guilty in December on five charges of child sex trafficking and related offences for recruiting underage girls for her twisted boyfriend to abuse.

As part of plea for leniency, her lawyers say she was also open to manipulation by Epstein, who killed himself in jail while awaiting trial, due to physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her father.

“She had a difficult, traumatic childhood with an overbearing, narcissistic and demanding father,” her lawyers stated.

“It made her vulnerable to Epstein, whom she met right after her father’s death.

“Ghislaine vividly recalls a time when, at age 13, she tacked a poster of a pony on the newly painted wall of her bedroom.

“This outraged her father, who took the hammer and banged on Ghislaine’s dominant hand.”

Her Czech-born father, whose birth name was Jan Hoch, won the Military Cross while serving with the British Army during the war before becoming the Labour MP for Buckingham from 1964 to 1970.

He bought Mirror Group Newspapers in 1984, from which he would go on to steal hundreds of millions of pounds from its pension fund to save his various companies from bankruptcy.

He died in mysterious circumstances after reportedly falling from his yacht while off the Canary Islands in November 1991.

Republican terrorists killed four MPs during the Troubles, with the Provisional IRA responsible for the murder of Ulster Unionist Robert Bradford in 1981 along with Conservatives Sir Anthony Berry in the 1984 Brighton bombing and Ian Gow in 1990.

The INLA killed Northern Ireland secretary Airey Neave in 1979 in a car bomb attack at the House of Commons.